


Nothing Goes Away

by trascendenza



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: AU, Episode: s01e20 Five Years Gone, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-05
Updated: 2007-11-05
Packaged: 2017-10-07 09:38:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/63845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trascendenza/pseuds/trascendenza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Kitty Pryde taught Hiro a long time ago that time is round, not straight, not linear.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing Goes Away

Hiro has read a lot about time since becoming a fugitive, in the brief periods when he isn't poring over every moment of the past that he can't—_won't_—accept.

He religiously devours every text he can find on the subject: scientific, philosophical, and when those avenues are exhausted, he turns to poetry and prose. He reads anything that may give him the slightest hint of how to control his power.

He'll need all the control he can get if he's going to go back and make things right.

*

One night, sword strapped to his back and crouched in a dark alley waiting for the dawn to signal attack, he reads a book that compares time to a series of liquid transparencies. It's in English, so he has to go over it a few times to be sure he's understood, but once he does, it's akin to the first time he stopped the hand of the clock: instantaneous and life-altering revelation.

*

Hiro draws his sword, placing it lengthwise across his lap. The book is open on the table, the edges of the pages earmarked and spine wrinkled from use. He glances at it one last time before closing his eyes. Exhaling a long, slow breath, he clears his mind with the steely patience he has cultivated in cold, dank jail cells and days spent lying in wait for just the right time to strike.

Instinct has told him that this is the day to strike into his past, and once his breathing is even and relaxed, he hones his focus to a very narrow point: his own timeline, the temporal composition that is Nakamura Hiro.

It's amorphous at first, a scattered series of images and sensations warped through the filter of his thoughts, but he sharpens it with concentration. He looks back, looks back and back and back, sifting through the piles of unimportant chaff, discarding anything that isn't—

_There_. He almost falters, breath hitching, but quickly regains his composure, fingers tightening around the hilt of his sword.

And _there_, and _there_. Behind that hazy memory of a green mountain, just beside the voice of his father, fractured in the broken window of an American car. Hints and hopes and promises floating in the current, just beyond Hiro's reach.

Hiro opens his eyes and smiles with an emotion that hasn't graced his face in the three years gone.

Hope.

*

Kitty Pryde taught Hiro a long time ago that time is round, not straight, not linear.

But what Hiro knows now—_feels_—is that time is not solid, either, it is not dense.

It is filmy, thin, and in some places, nearly ready to tear.

So Hiro closes his eyes again, and holds the hilt of his sword, finding the weakest barrier between him and then, between right and wrong, and he _pushes_, determined to take one of those stolen moments for his own. No more regrets. Not even a tinge of doubt.

Saving Ando is worth the space/time continuum.

**Author's Note:**

> _"But I began to think of time as having a shape, something you can see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don't look back along time, but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away."_ (Cat's Eye, by Margaret Atwood)


End file.
